Massive Solar Flares: Part I

At http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/11/mysterious-radiation-spike-could-ha… … Ananya Bhattacharya reports, the mysterious spike in atmospheric C14 levels in 774/5AD may be a sign that the Sun is capable of producing solar storms many times worse than anything we have experienced in recent centuries – or currently allowed in consensus science thinking. A paper in Nature says that C14 is created when high energy radiation strikes the Earth's upper atmosphere, converting Nitrogen 14 into C14 – which eventually makes it's way into plants via photosynthesis. Earlier in the year, a team of Japanese scientists discovered the spike in the tree rings of Japanese cedars. They could not explain the spike. The new study now says they went wrong by assuming solar storms shine like light bulbs, radiating energy uniformly in all directions. However, solar storms produce blobs of energetic particles that explode outwards unevenly. This means the size of the solar storm was probably not as great as imagined. It was not 1000 times larger but possibly just 10 times larger than recent solar CMEs – which is a very big difference. Therefore, a solar storm is now back on the table as a reasonable explanation.